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Ron Littlepage: Get yer popcorn ready!!!

One person intimately familiar with the city’s budget process predicted recently “this will be one hot summer.”

A special meeting of the City Council Finance Committee Tuesday morning certainly turned up the thermostat.

The meeting was called to discuss setting the preliminary property tax rate for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.

An ordinance doing that was on the agenda for the full council to consider later Tuesday evening.

CHANGES NEEDED

First, a comment on this part of the process: It’s ridiculous.

The City Council gets the proposed budget from the Mayor’s Office early in July. The council auditor then only has a short time to begin reviewing the proposal before the council has to set the preliminary tax rate to meet the requirements of the state’s Truth in Millage law.

This year, the deadline for setting that tax rate is Aug. 4, and Tuesday night’s council meeting was the last regularly scheduled meeting to get that done.

To say that Council Auditor Kirk Sherman and City Council members had some questions about the budget proposal by Mayor Alvin Brown is akin to saying the new scoreboards at EverBank Field are sort of big.

After much discussion, Finance Committee members recommended that a special council meeting be called before Aug. 4 to provide more time to come up with answers before taking action.

This craziness has become a summer event as habitual as afternoon thunderstorms.

“We need to fix this,” Councilman John Crescimbeni said during the debate.

He’s right, and probably the best bet would be to require the Mayor’s Office to submit the budget earlier to give the council and council auditor more time to review it before setting the preliminary tax rate.

There’s another option that would solve the problem for this year, but it’s like asking council members to kiss a rattlesnake, especially during an election year.

The Aug. 4 deadline is set so the Property Appraiser’s Office has time to send property owners notices of what their taxes would be under the preliminary rate.

If later during the budget process, which consumes much of August and September, the council decides to lower the tax rate, no problem.

However, if the council finds itself in a bind trying to balance the budget without making severe cuts and wants a higher rate, notices of that change would have to be sent to property owners, which is a costly process.

Sherman told the Finance Committee the best course would be to add 1 mill to the tax rate Brown proposed, which would produce $46 million in additional revenue and give council members some “working room” as they go through the budget.

The council, as noted above, could lower the tax rate without new notices, but a cushion would be there if it’s absolutely needed.

The usual excuse from council members for not doing that is the temptation to spend the money would be too great for them to resist.

Come on, as one council member is fond of saying, put your big boy and big girl pants on.

MORE INFORMATION NEEDED

Sherman does have questions aplenty: He thinks the proposed budget is $11 million short in payments to the Police and Fire Pension Fund, the revenue projections are overestimated by $4.5 million and the budget relies on spending $37 million in reserves, to name a few.

The Mayor’s Office, of course, disagrees.

Let’s just say that much of the discussion was lively.

Councilman Bill Bishop, who is running for mayor, called the budget “an exercise in creative accounting.”

Councilman Bill Gulliford, who is considering a run for mayor, called it a “sham.”